Nobody has mentioned the real problem is that most Hollywood movies these days are recycled garbage.
People are probably going to switch from Netflix over to Disney+ once it is launched. Once Netflix is gone, Disney+ would then jack up its price to $40/month. I think we have all seen this movie too many times before.
If you look at the pricing ($6.99/mo) and content of Disney+ its honestly meant to be an add-on to a person/family's existing media subscription set. Disney+ will only contain content from their large IP (Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar, Disney Studios) in addition to some National Geographic content.
There will be nowhere near the amount of content of Netflix. Additionally all content seems to skew family friendly, which isn't true of Netflix. Lastly, its clear given their recent takeover of Hulu (plus what was said in the Dinsey+ unveil) that Hulu will be their Netflix competitor.
I'm disappointed, but not suprised, to see this post so high. Despite all the ways of watching films at home, cinema is having its most successful years ever, so clearly many people are enjoying the films Hollywood is putting out.
I'm disappointed, but not surprised in your measurement of success. Many tout record box office takings as clear success but I rather think that really reflects on inflation (both real and artificial).
Look at admissions over time. I only have UK numbers to hand [1] but despite an increasing population, we're still at barely a tenth of our 1950 numbers. MPAA stats [2] seem to show the US in decline over the last few years but I cant find a nice table to do an 84y comparison.
So again, cinema might be taking absolutely more money than ever before, but that's probably through higher ticket sales. Numbers of bums on seats is not breaking any records.
A big (huge) driver is the Asian markets, with China having allowed more foreign movies in - and a huge upsurge of cinemas being built there. A lot of (blockbuster) movies are actively made nowadays with the huge Chinese market in mind, and / or are being co-produced and / or funded by Chinese companies.
(There's some common tropes in that category; PG-12, if that rating, has to feature at least one major Chinese city and one or two Chinese actors, and the Chinese are never the bad guys. These things also apply to the Americans. Basically, the two propaganda machines combined.)
I have also noticed a decent amount of new releases have both a Chinese and American production company associated with the movie, and there appear to be cultural and character references that resonate with both.
From the data in your link [1] Cinema attendance looks very healthy, and in fact in 2018 was at it's highest level since 1971 and is more than tripple it's low point in 1984. That much better than I was expecting and frankly in my eyes kills the 'Cinema is dying' meme stone dead. I don't understand how you can be looking at the same table and coming to such a different conclusion.
I'm not saying cinema is dying, at all. I'm reacting to a statement that said "cinema is having its most successful years ever". That is only true in gross and that's only true because tickets are so expensive.
If you're going to make qualitative claims, where the price of a unit is largely fixed at a point in time, I think you have to compare quantity of sales, not gross.
It's all marketing wank. A way for producers to pomp around with their "record"-breaking titles. And at a financial level, sure, whatever... But that's not how these statements are used.
The problem with cinema attendance, at least here in the United States, is you can't trust the numbers anymore.
Take AMC, they have their A List that allows you to see 3 movies a week for a monthly fee, if you head over to /r/AMCsAList/ you will find a good number of people that will go see movies they have little interest in JUST to use all their 'free' movies each week so now you have someone that may have seen 2-3 movies a month, seeing 12 movies. Occasionally you'll even see threads over there where people brag about how many weeks long their streak of seeing all their movies is.
Similarly there was MoviePass (I think it's mostly dead now) that was allowing people to do the same for over a year.
Those aren't the numbers I see [1]. For domestic US, Endgame is in 18th place.
Why not worldwide? Even the US numbers are rickety. There are multiple ways to account for inflation, multiple ways of record counting for sales, trying to factor in re-showings, etc. Adding on multiple currencies and economies is a power of extra complexity.
> There's tons more money out there now
Yes. Money. My whole thing here has been about weighing success by monetary takings. It doesn't necessarily track. The price of a ticket has far outstripped what retail indexed inflation. Tickets, after inflation, are eighteen times more expensive than their 1950s counterparts. You only a eighteenth of the 1950s audience to gross the same.
But while we're talking about bullshit headlines, looking up Endgame renders some gems [2]. Things like "Fastest to $1bn" aren't just historically incomparable because of inflation but because distribution has changed significantly. Movies in the US used to have months of lead-time ahead of the global market. There still is for many languages. Modern studios recognise the waste and damage in this. Endgame was globally available (to over half the population) within 4 days. "Highest Opening Weekend" grossses also have the same problem.
The US economy hasn't grown much, adjusted for inflation, compared to the world economy. That's primarily because of the rest of the world was much poorer.
The original statement of Endgame beating Avatar is still incorrect. Which is what started this chain of comments in the first place. Along with Endgame not even beating Avatar worldwide without inflation (currency exchange rates aren’t going to be that drastic with a decade population and financial growth).
Where did you get your numbers from? Endgame won’t beat Avatar at all without inflation worldwide. In the US it doesn’t beat Avatar with inflation adjusted. Then you have Titanic that just completely destroys Endgame after inflation in the US. Probably worldwide too. Though that’s harder to say and there wasn’t really China back then. Along with China being much smaller for Avatar too.
> cinema is having its most successful years ever, so clearly many people are enjoying the films Hollywood is putting out.
Is that really true or is it just films like "Avengers" who make Hollywood's balance sheet look better than ever?
I'm not entirely convinced that the film industry can survive without giant blockbusters like that.
You might say that there's always been blockbusters, but although I don't have any data on this I imagine the proportion of $ that these films make up has only grown over time. Maybe leading to a reliance on a few big hits.
I consider this one of the reasons we've seen a proliferation of super-hero/comic adaptions (an endless supply of material here) and other giant movies tapping into an existing fanbase (Star Wars, Fast/Furious, etc).
Some people I know in film have told me the following:
A lot of films that would have US pull no longer get made. That's because the US is at most 300m people, and there's billions more that aren't reached. Whereas any movie made now needs to have international trends. So you end up with comic books made as movies and tv shows. They have been tested in print, work with other cultures, and make money hand over fist.
Tl;dr. Making movies for a country is last century. New movies need to capitalize on international sales.
Poignant example is the World of Warcraft movie; it bombed in the US, but it was super popular in China.
This is also why Netflix will probably not die; for me personally, 90% of their original content is a bit shit, however I am also very aware that a lot of people enjoy that 90% I don't, e.g. my parents. And then there's the huge international market, each country, each region has its own preferences.
What I'm saying is there will be people that enjoy some content and keep their subscription for that show. Netflix doesn't need to optimize for one demographic.
That's an interesting take on the quality issues of these recent films. It's true that you sort of have to dumb down your content if you aim to make it popular for a wider population. If the movie plots require a bit of thinking or the use of brain resources then most viewers probably will not get it.
Though I understand Hollywood has always been about about making profits, but in the end this will only lead to more movies simply being treated as a tool to generate revenue rather an outlet for creativity and great story telling, which was exactly what made them great in the past. In that perspective, there's no difference between a movie and a piece of commercial software.
Big explosions and FX effects are not elements that make a film great as they do nothing to connect deeply with the audiences on a human level. They are shallow, cool and awesome for five seconds but that's about it. The more you watch these films, the more you become like the population they want to target.
Couldn't that be illusory? There's more people watching films now than there ever has been before. And if there were only one film released this year, it would surely break all the records because nobody would have anything else to watch. That wouldn't mean that film was the best film ever. A larger number of more diverse films could generate more total income and offer more satisfaction, but it would be much harder for them to break records.
I wish that Hollywood still made movies for the the 30+ non-geek audience of which I am a part of, I almost literally fell asleep during the last Avengers movie. There are some gems here and there (the last two Peele movies) but they are getting really far and few between.
I thought that Get Out and Us had at least some Hollywood funding, looks like I was wrong. For example “Cape Fear” and “The Fugitive” made in the early ‘90s were pure Hollywood movies that were interesting for grown-ups, too, I fail to see something like that filmed nowadays (both of them were remakes, too, proof that you can film a remake and still produce an interesting movie after all). I also miss smart action-oriented/thriller movies like “Enemy of the State”.
Hollywood released several hundred movies last year. In theaters.
They simply didn't advertise them as much as they did the blockbusters, because advertising is very expensive and most films are capable of making back their production budgets but not the advertising budgets (which can equal or even exceed the actual cost of making the movie, see e.g., Solo which was considered a loss because of the amount Disney spent advertising the film).
> Second is pretty much 90% self-produced TV series.
There's nothing wrong with producing TV series... there's something else you don't like, right? These particular ones? Or is it the fact that they are self produced?
You can't really blame Netflix for not having access to the most popular content. I'm pretty sure they'd love to pay if it meant being authorized to distribute it.
Despite my other reply in this sub-thread, no, I don't think recycling is the real problem. Access, price and availability of cheaper alternatives have all pushed cinema into decline.
I certainly don't disagree that they should embrace an open market and liberal distribution, but trying to draw performance outcomes from subjective qualities is silly.
For me it's a simple equation that has as much to do with time and hassle as it has to do with money. I'm not going to juggle five different monthly subscriptions. I'll pay Netflix for their decent original content and all my old favorites like Star Trek. I'll buy a month of Hbo every couple years to catch up with them. I'm not going to pay $200 for a cable subscription and I'm not going to pay for Netflix and YouTube Red and Disney+ and Hulu and CBS All Access and whatever other service all at the same time. It's already a pain in the ass to figure out if Movie X is available on the services I already pay for. I'll just go back to piracy like I did before Netflix existed.
I'm also happy paying for content but equally happy to immediately switch to pirating if it gets too complicated. Probably easier now than it was before - internet is a lot faster, anonymity is a lot better, hardware is a lot cheaper and things like Plex make it pretty damn straight forward to get it up and going.
Almost everyone in Australia pirated Game of Thrones -- the only streaming service provider was also the only major cable TV operator and not many people took the bait and signed up.
That's exactly the thing. I have never paid for a subscription because I'm a good person. I've just always gone the path of least resistance. The $15/month is just cheaper than piracy for me.
Game of Thrones and HBO is a great example. Until this year it was completely impossible to see Game of Thrones legally in Canada without a traditional cable/satellite subscription. And yet they'd send me a Notice and Notice email every single time someone on my IP address pirated an episode telling me about how HBO is now online and it's never been easier to watch legally... except you must have Bell/Rogers/Whatever subscription first.
We're finally seeing the old guard corporate decision makers with their obsolete understanding of their industry being dragged kicking and screaming into this millennium.
Piracy is getting more attractive, too. Since works get taken out of streaming, you might find things aren't available next month. So even when I have a subscription, I'll still pirate things (the same things!), to create a permanent library and make switching easer, now that streaming libraries per service are shrinking drastically.
Since works get taken out of streaming, you might find things aren't available next month
Either that or Netflix only has rights to the first couple of seasons (or in some cases the middle few seasons) so if you actually end up liking the show you're screwed since you won't be able to watch the whole thing.
Another annoying problem is that in some cases and in some countries Netflix only has the dubbed version of a movie or show and so you're again screwed if you want to watch the original version.
Another weird corner case is when you want to watch a foreign language film, but because I happen to be in a country where I don't speak any of the local languages I also can't use subtitles (they don't provide English subtitles universally). This is probably an incredibly rare thing for most people though I admit.
Funny enough my experience was in fact in Switzerland, providing only German and French subtitles (not even Italian), so perhaps this is less of a corner case than I thought.
Part of the "original" appeal of Netfix was that it was a one-stop-shop, and that effectively killed piracy for a large number of people. The legal solution was easier than the illegal one!
Segregation will just revert many back to piracy as you say, until some future round of consolidation.
Exactly. Same thing was with Steam from Valve. But now both streaming and gaming platforms get a split, thus creating many complications for users. I bet that will increase piracy in both worlds.
At least with video games, having access to multiple online stores is free. Steam and the epic store work side by side just fine - unlike video there's no subscription fee to have access to both catalogues.
Well, and for those of us who had the GOG and/or Uplay launchers anyway, or already had our achievements fractured between PC and one or more console ecosystems, having to install the Epic Games one just wasn't that big a deal. Especially with the bait of free games, exclusives, and the crazy $10 off summer sale promotion.
I got it for the Hades early access and to play Transistor and Rime for free.
Used to be more lax about it, but now i limit where i have my digital goods at. I have steam and gog accounts.
I had/have whole bunch of games both on other sites, but after having my cc info stolen several times when buying stuff from random sites, I limit my exposure.
I do have uplay, and ea store on my computer, but i did not buy any games on them (and they don't have my cc info), they were requirements for playing games i bought on steam.
I might eventually also get epic store, if it lives for couple of years, and doesn't get any breaches, and has games I am interested in (don't really care about shooters)
Does it finally allow for offline execution of games? Epic just had some good deals for market dominance. Makes sense, since they now have the capital. There are some interesting exclusives, but I resisted in creating an account because I would regret it later.
There might be better deals for developers in there, but that will undoubtedly change if the goal of market dominance is reached. It is an overall really bad choice for consumers on nearly every level. I don't really see them as serious competition to steam and GOG.
Can you expand more on the "overall really bad choice for consumers"? Obviously it's missing a bunch of stuff that Steam has, like forums, ratings, cloud saves, offline play, shopping cart, wishlist, etc. But none of those are essential requirements, they're just features and can be built up over time.
They're doing a better revenue split than Steam, and they're subsidizing many purchases to offer more attractive prices. And they're offering some previous PS4 exclusives on PC for the first time, like Journey/Flow/Flower and the Quantic Dream games.
How is this worse for either consumers or publishers than a total Steam hegemony? I'm not trying to be combative, but I don't understand the mindset.
I should note that Epic store is mostly viable because of Valve believing they can get things as locked down as Apple and Google and thus can charge the same 30 % tax.
"Alternate App Store for iOS" is never going to work, at least if someone doesn't break Apple monopoly.
But that's not the case for PC games. So alternate store that charges less is obvious optimization.
Netflix streaming has never been a one stop shop for movies. It has usually had a relatively weak line up. They had deals with STARZ early on and later Epix that helped.
It's never been a one stop shop for movie streaming. Let's not forget they started as a Blockbuster competitor that mailed you DVDs, and they had (have?) a pretty big catalog of those.
Yeah they still have a little over 3 million DVD by mail customers. But, I’m not overly price sensitive. I’ll just rent a movie most of the time. It got to the point where I’m too lazy to use But torrent even thousands though I do have a Plex server running.
I bought a Chromecast because it worked with Netflix and stupid cheap. It is convenient! Then comes Amazon Prime and says I need to buy another dongle to watch them. I am so not interested. Grow up, work together with Google, I can't care less whatever petty competition you are playing, your problem not mine. I will just pirate the things I wanted from Prime.
It won't help you quite yet, but Google and Amazon resolved their issues around this in April[0] and their press release says you'll be able to watch Prime Video on your Chromecast later in the year.
This is the same old out of touch attitude that led to the “you wouldn’t steal a car would you” commercials.
Nobody has to watch the content but they want to. You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click. I agree that people should not be entitled to the intellectual property of others. However, like the war on drugs and sex education sometime the best answer is to recognize the reality and stop pushing teetotalism.
Content providers had a good thing going with Netflix and Hulu. Those two services had a recognized impact on content piracy. Yet here we are, repeating the mistakes of the past while the customer takes the path of least resistance. Right now if I pull up “Doctor Who” on my Apple TV I can watch all the episodes. I just have to switch between 3 different services, sometimes in the middle of a season, to do it. Yes I pay for those services, one included with my cable subscription.
But all of this is pretty silly to argue about to be honest. We’re absolutely spoiled with so much entertainment and media at our fingertips. The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.
> You have fly-by-nights and unethical operations abounding that make everything only a google search away, sometimes with a single click.
Somebody uploaded the entire The Queen's Corgi on YouTube in pristine 720p quality (they must have had access to a BluRay to get this quality) and it's not even out in the USA yet (I am not even sure it'll even be released at all). No tricks, no visual artefacts to hide it, nothing. It's been up since May 28 and apparently noone cares.
> The “us” of 20 years ago would wonder WTF were arguing about and pay out the nose for these capabilities.
Online P2P networking also skyrocketed at this time. In 2001 we had eDonkey2000 with ShareReactor and DC++ for the Direct Connect network. In 2003, Demonoid and Pirate Bay launches.
Interesting rabbit hole, that one. Seems to be a movie to cash in on "The Secret Life of Pets" which itself was probably a movie made to cash in on whatever Pixar had at the time. Release dates are wonky - it's been out in Belgium for months, which is probably how it appeared online.
I hadn't heard about the movie before - but because someone pirated it maybe I'll watch it now.
You reminded me of "the scene" back in the old days where movie groups like Centropy and many others were releasing latest films on FTP servers which were typically running on 100Mbps dedicated connections, gigabit lines were quite rare back then and mostly reserved for the most elite groups like FLT (PC Games). Releases were usually "pre'd" on affiliated topsites before getting spread to other lower tier sites via FXP transferring method by individuals called "couriers" in exchange for download credits (usually at 1:3 ratios), and it would eventually reach other p2p outlets such as DC++. Most of those release groups had their own private channels on IRC where members were like family, and they were really just a bunch of geeks. Fun time!
You tell me... I was helping one of the admins of one of the largest second tier FTP sites in Central Europe because his English was not so great... so yeah, I remember this scene too quite well.
If you have time and are so inclined, would you mind sharing more of your experiences running that site? I may not be the only one interested in a little behind-the-scenes peak at how such an interesting part of internet history.
Oh and I forgot: even 20 years ago the infamous DivX ;-) codec was already out. It wasn't xvid, it was DivX that started the digital movie piracy big time.
While I get the moral argument here, I'm going to go with the market signaling. Hollywood can get its shit together and make something that's convenient, or it can die. Either choice is fine by me, and I'll figure out how to integrate piracy in my moral framework later.
The future I want looks like what GoG is for games, or Bandcamp is for music.
It's definitely interesting in that this is a great example of the "when elephant's fight it's the grass that gets trampled".
Amazon trying to battle Google results in chx's purchased hardware not being supported by Amazon's service despite the fact it's a very standard streaming device.
It by no means gives any rights to breaching intellectual property laws, but Amazon are making a commercial decision to leave out Chromecast support because they believe it'll make them more money overall, with the express knowledge that it could drive some potential customers to alternative methods, which includes breach of intellectual property laws ("piracy"). It's not like "piracy" isn't known to be a potential option when the likes of Amazon and Google and all the others make business decisions.
No, it's not a justification of illegality, but it's an understandable position to take as an offset.
It also drives people away and reduces the viewers making it less attractive as a platform without piracy. That increases the cost as stars prefer a larger platform money being equal.
its more likely that they already have a piracy workflow and the inconvenience isn't enough to disrupt that workflow, unlike their experience with Netflix / Plex with the Chromecast.
I'm just saying that for people who have no issues with piracy, the provider has an even more difficult time winning their business. For companies like Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc, it should be in their best interest to be available on all platforms like Chromecast, etc.
We're not debating the views of piracy from the parent -- that was already established.
>I'll just go back to piracy like I did before Netflix existed.
It amazes me they seem to be completely oblivious that this will be the the result. A percentage of someone else's revenue is still a bigger number than a percentage of nothing...
The majority of people either have a moral issue with 100% piracy or cannot easily figure out how to do it.
Public torrents lead to getting piracy emails from your isp. Private torrents are annoying and difficult. In general you have to deal with shady organizations and without experience it’s hard to know what’s a scam and what isn’t.
And I suspect the vast majority of pirates never stopped. And wouldn’t stop unless the price was well below fair value. Winning over pirates is shitty business strategy.
Also Netflix’s 12 bucks a month isn’t enough to fund all the media that’s created. Netflix would have to charge a lot more (indistinguishable from multiple services that charge less) or less tv/movies would get made. Netflix’s larger catalog of old was subsidized by network and cable companies. They sold rights for pennies on the dollar. But Netflix is killing those networks. The business method isn’t viable.
I suspect they're gambling that once people have sampled the "don't get off the couch" convenience of streaming, piracy won't be an appetizing alternative. I did always think that piracy was more about convenience than price for people who aren't broke college students.
> I did always think that piracy was more about convenience than price for people who aren't broke college students.
True, I would pay 1 or 2 streaming services (as I do the right now) - but more? No thank you, this becomes cluttered, confusing and inconvenient.
Today, I still torrent stuff even if it's available on a streaming service I already pay for (which I don't see as piracy), for 2 main reasons: guaranteed quality and ease of use.
My Plex server is the go-to place for most of the better quality shows we follow, and Netflix is for a lot of the 'meh' content you browse when you're not sure what to see, or what I call 'throw away' content we would never watch a second time. I do want to encourage them to keep making good content however, so I don't mind paying for it.
So far, Netflix has been rather consumer-focused and as a company has - afaik - done nothing to damage my trust, but that's not something I can say about all those companies having or planning to offer streaming services.
I would gladly pay for an HBO subscription if it were available here, since they produce some serious quality content - but it isn't. I would however most likely still torrent their shows.
We roll the same way. But I have Amazon Prime as well.
My current working rule is no more than two video services. Amazon Prime may be hard to dislodge because my whole family uses my account. So when we turn HBO on in a few weeks to close out GOT, we will shutdown Netflix for awhile at least.
If money is really no object, then almost all content is available for individual digital purchase on iTunes or Amazon still. But I'd also understand if that cost is a completely different ballgame than streaming.
Am I the only one who doesn’t threaten piracy when I don’t get exactly what I want for the price I want? Is it really that unusual to not take things that you shouldn’t? I mean if Hulu doesn’t have a movie I want to watch I’ll just watch something else, I won’t go take it because I feel entitled.
But I'll admit sometimes they try really hard to make a pirate out of us by brilliant moves like making 2 out of three LOTR movies available on Netflix or sending all except one single episode of a season of Deadliest Catch on my cable subscription.
Maybe one day I'll start downloading too thought, but usually I don't care and don't have time for movies anyway.
I will find movies that fall off the back of a truck onto my Plex server. But often, it’s not worth the hassle and I’ll just rent it from iTunes. For TV shows, I’ll pay For a month to stream a few shows I care about.
That being said, we do have Netflix free through T-mobile, Hulu mostly for my sons, Amazon Prime, and DC Universe for the few originals and the comics.
What you call entitlement, I call a vice. You don't build a business model upon a framework of addictive & memetic psychology and then blame your customers when they feel entitled to it. That entitlement is the whole point. Most of us would be better off watching less TV, and we realize that, which makes it hard to justify spending more money on it.
Eh, it's one industry where consumers have a trump card. It's not like people haven't been creating free media content since the beginning of media anyway.
It's not a threat, because I don't consider media piracy to be morally any different than "pirating" a recipe by printing it out, "pirating" a joke by retelling it, or "pirating" a book by lending it to a friend. It's not "taken" from anyone, it is replicated by someone who already has it and then given freely to me.
In the UK, at least, public libraries pay a tiny fee to the author each time the book is borrowed. We are talking pennies a year but, in terms of intent at least, it is not the same.
Whoever would have gotten the royalties from watching that something else on Hula would not get that if instead he pirated the movie he originally wanted to watch.
This aspect is often overlooked when people analyze the impact of piracy. People just look at the sales of the seller of the pirated item, and so if it costs $X and $X is more than I am willing to spend, my pirating won't cost them a sale because there was no scenario in which I was going to buy, and so no harm was done to that seller.
But in the case of entertainment products, if piracy is not available I'm probably not going to simply forego entertainment. I'll instead look for something that is within my budget and entertain myself with that instead.
I appreciate where you are coming from. Many people understand that, physically, 'pirating' is more akin to copying than taking though. ..And then there is an argument that increasing the availability of content increases the revenue of the producer in the long run. Some game developers and many musicians are even releasing official torrents of their content, assuring quality control. I'm curious how this would work out if bigger studios dabbled with it.
Most people dont know but you can get P4S (plex for share) where you pay (or free) someone to get added on their plex library. Some of these servers have CDN and have 90+TB storage with automated requests system. Thousands of shows and movies. You can also get IPTV, which is basivally cable TV through internet for 10$/month. 5000 channels. You ask how its possible? Basically fly by night companies redistributing cable. Some have sweared by it being good. Does anybody in HN hsvr more ecperience in
Am I misunderstanding the idea behind the first thing, or is that just piracy that you pay for? If you're going to go to the trouble and / or risk of pirating things and have enough technical knowhow to setup Plex on your local device, I don't know why you wouldn't just go for an old fashioned approach ... which is usually free, better quality, more reliable, etc.
Being able to setup a legal program like Plex and knowing how to pirate high quality versions of all the media you want are two different things. People bought into Hulu and Netflix when you could get nearly everything you wanted to watch on their services.
Plex is legal to use, but not all that easy to set up, at least in my experience. At least, I would expect anyone capable of using Plex longterm on a TV to also be able to pirate stuff.
The point about legality wasn't about Plex, however. It was about paying someone to torrent stuff for you, which is still copyright infringement.
Some tech-savvy people in here (Poland) also use cardsharing. Basically it's normal, satellite TV, but they don't get a legal card and set top box from the provider. Instead, some shady company hosted in the Netherlands buys them in bulk, puts it in some special module and lets multiple people use them. It's apparently one card per 3 or 4 subscribers at a time, not one card per household. Haven't tried it muself but apparently it's cheap and reliable.
around 75zł (around $20) for a 90-day package that offers the two satellite providers in common use, with all channels and PPV events unlocked. A premium TV package with just one of those would be around 120 zł (around $35). Basically all TV that you could ever want over here. There aren't any channels not on one of those two. Everything is paid via bitcoin and you only use the internet to transmit the keys (which are small enough to work well on dial up), so throttling, tracking and flaky connections aren't really that much of an issue. The only downside, and a big one, is that you need to find and purchase an appropriate box (around 200zł or so I've heard) or an extension card for your PC. Then you need to configure everything, install some plug ins, use an english interface, upload a config via ftp etc. I'm only vaguely familiar with the process myself, as I haven't ever set something like that up, but it's definitely not for the sort that can't tell a search engine from a web browser. Bitcoin is also a hassle. That's why no one really uses it, I guess.
It's frustrating that with the fragmentation of Streaming services it's tempting to get back to piracy. It's like we are back to the beginning of piracy. Today you can get a pirate IPTV provider for ten bucks and set it up on your AppleTV and bingo you get 5000+ tv channels, thousands of movies. I have Netflix, Hulu, Molotov using smart DNS but I also have one IPTV provider to be complete...
> When I travel to different countries and pull up Netflix, I see shows available in that country that aren't available in another. It's annoying.
This is, a lot of time, not Netflix fault (or only partially).
Distribution contract with exclusivity clauses can have been signed before Netflix ultimately implanted in the country. It means, they cannot get the right to stream even if they wanted before X years. They also have to start competing against local company who are already well integrated in the local market and can have more leverage power / money to invest.
At the end of the day, hen Netflix start in a country with X amount of user but a local TV station already have several time the viewer, there is less incentive for Netflix to spend big bucks to get a specific license until they reach a bigger amount of membership.
Yes okay, people also don't care about the intricacies of gravity but it's still affect them.
Just like you cant decide how gravity works, Netflix cant get licensing however they want.
Also, I highly doubt that traveling to an other country is more easy than getting the show in you own country. Unless it is banned in your country, the cost of a blue-ray is usually way cheaper than a flight ticket.
I used to always use a VPN for Netflix but then they started cracking down and it stopped working. Are you still able to use a VPN to view content from a different region?
It also depends on which country you want to watch through a VPN. The most desired countries like US / UK usually have a lot of working VPNs available as the VPN companies put a lot of resources into keeping them working. Using a VPN for a smaller country usually doesn't work in my experience.
Setting up you own VPN with a cheap VPS has a higher chance of working but you have to be careful about your VPS provider.
For example, I know that a lot of OVH owned IPs are banned from Netflix.
I find the arguments about pirating interesting; they often go into arguments about "intellectual property", but what we're really talking about here are different publishing methods. BitTorrent is one fairly effective publisher that does offer content for free, but it does require a consumer to take on some costs: risk of going to a sketchy site and risk to their computer (viruses). If a streaming service is good enough and cheap enough, it can offer enough value to a consumer that the consumer will choose the streaming service over BitTorrent.
Considering that this is going to require streaming services to really reduce the cost to the consumer, how can the streaming services have a sustainable business model over the long term to support themselves? The subscription model is one way, but the gaming industry may be ahead here: charge for each individual item, but make it really cheap. For example, a consumer might scoff at paying $3 per episode of GoT, but $1 or $.50 might be pretty nice... add that up for a season, and your streaming service has made almost as much as a subscription would have made. Of course, this requires streaming services to continue to offer new, good content to continue to entice consumers, which they might not like having to do.
I don't think piracy will come back as streaming becomes more segregated, people generally will go with the legitimate market over illegal means as long as the fiction is under a certain level. Most Americans would rather pay an extra $15 a month for streaming that to pirate content and go through the "hassle" of getting that pirated content on their TV. How many non-tech people do you know who can mirror a PC or laptop to their TV?
True, but they won't pay $15/month x 5 different services.
Netflix is already iffy in terms of content/quality, without some blockbusters, then it's really kind of b-films and bad tv, the occasional great show.
Disney et. al. may not produce enough content to warrant $15 themselves.
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
They should take note however, that we are 'done' with commercials.
My old dad would rather pirate then pay any amount of money and still have commercials shoved down his throat. He feels it is double dipping so to speak. Plus pirates get 4K streams vs Netflix which serves you quality based on what you pay. I feel the hassle was fixed a long time ago. It’s pretty much point and click these days.
> Plus pirates get 4K streams vs Netflix which serves you quality based on what you pay.
And based on your operating system and browser. Even FullHD is hard (might still be impossible even) to get if you run a free software stack. Netflix wants you to run the heaviest DRM stack possible (even though their content is available in 4K from your local friendly neighbourhood torrent site).
Plex is a really easy way to stream video files from your computer to a chromecast, and I can use my phone as a remote. It works just as well as googe play and better than my current amazon workflow.(Which I can only play from the computer because they won't allow streaming to chromecast)
You are not accounting for the important part of sourcing the pirated movies and running a Plex server though? That's what 99% of the people who only want to consume will be struggling with, not the playback client.
Sonarr/Radarr can acquire the media files fairly easily, requires not that much setup. If torrent is risky in your country, they also support Usenet, which has most of the recent releases as well (and can be faster in some situations).
Setting up sonarr and radarr is not trivial, especially if you’re hooking it up to Usenet. I spend a couple of hours every year repairing the setup after the NAS has updated the mono version.
Finding the right Usenet server and the correct alternative block accounts, and then just the right search provider. Ugh. But it’s magical once everything is setup.
It's not actually that complicated. There are templates that let you deploy both in a single click on a webinterface. You can use free crawlers for content out of the box.
Various usenet providers provide you with picture-by-picture guides on how to setup Sonarr and Radarr.
There are single-click Usenet and Torrent clients with VPN integration. Just upload the ovpn file as provided by your VPN provider and you're done.
This is all either single click or explained thuroughly and easy to understand on-site or in the products FAQ/Installation Guide.
Once you have it all, you can share Plex with others, which is even more easy than all of the above. Your friends and family have access to all the movies for very low cost (up to free).
I'm new to all of that Sonarr/Radarr/Ombi stuff, but I torrented for along long time. It took me some time to set it up, granted I had to make it work with my torrent client and trackers that where already in place.
But before people can start with that they have to inform them self about usenet vs torrent, VPN yes / no and what provider, Plex/Emby or Jellyfin etc. It's a huge time commitment.
Then get it to work on your TV and phone.
Even if there is a guide to just tells you what is best, I doubt it can be done in the time most people want to invest.
The thing is, even if it's a huge time investment, if it's perceived to be easier and cheaper enough than subscribing to all the content providers (Hulu, HBO, Netflix, Amazon, Netflix and Disney+ just for TV content), people will do it.
Piracy was more complicated in the past and lots of people, even people with 0 technical knowledge did it. The only reason people stopped is because Netflix and friends made the legal alternative easier.
If piracy once again becomes easier than legal streaming, people will simply switch to piracy. It's as easy as that.
In some countries (Germany) using public torrent trackers (like what popcorntime is doing behind the scenes) will result in 300+ Euros of fines pretty quickly. You also have to factor the legality in which is a pretty big factor for choosing to pay on top of convenience I‘d guess.
Now you also have to explain your non-technical guest how to use a VPN, pay for it and make sure it’s always running before starting popcorntime.
i just set it up in the router, all they do is connect to wifi and follow a link. i do it for personal home movies but you could extend the concept trivially for sharing a home library of copyrighted torrented movies
These technical friends may exist, but I'd guess most of the people would rather pay 15$ / month to some provider than bothering their friend to set them up with a Plex server, maintaining it, figuring out what file to download ("What is this 1080p, 720p?), waiting for downloads to be done, clear out old torrents so they have disk space again.
These are all things that are fun to "us" technical people and I don't mind doing them for myself but if you have to choose between relying on someone else to keep your setup running or just paying someone and have a hands off solution most people will do that. Don't forget that this is very biased community here, it makes comments like this sound a bit like the dropbox vs a pile of shell scripts post.
I think you're overestimating the difficulty of plex.
There's no real maintenance, you don't have to be very technical to download a file(it's two clicks), and if they don't know the difference between 1080p and 720p they don't care, they've waited for downloads before, and hard drives are so large now you rarely have to clear out them out.
My wife uses plex without any problem and she can't stand technology. But besides an issue which comes up every couple of years it's as simple as click and play.
And you're 100% right most people would rather pay someone to take that off their hands. But if things get to the point where you need 15 $10/month subscriptions and can only buy certain shows from one of the 15 mobile apps which have varying levels of compatibility with casters, more people will start looking at other options.
I have a very well oiled Plex / Flexget / Sonarr setup myself so I know what you are talking about and it's seriously great.
If you set it up for someone it'll work very well but if you have to do it yourself, or ask someone else to do it for you and they don't already have their own setup and offer it to you it's not really an option for most people who don't like to tinker with these things in their free time.
I think we can agree on that it's great for people who'd like to tinker and maybe offer it to their family members, maybe even with something like http://plexrequests.8bits.ca but for "normal" people it's not really an option.
I would agree in the past, you needed something like a dedicated media center PC. But these days it is cheap as hell for an old PC, or laptop or smart phone that can handle video just fine. Even a new computer device is pretty damn cheap to have just for your TV. Also, everyone is assuming people are downloading torrents for their media piracy, but everything you can find on a torrent website you can easily find on a streaming site. The only reason to torrent a show or movie over streaming an illegitimate copy is if you plan on watching it a dozen times over and you have limited bandwidth.
While legit streaming servers are a bit easier to use, illegitimate streaming websites are only just barely behind that and also contain pretty much every tv show or movie you could ever want to watch. The only real downside I see is the usual lack of closed captioning support. If my choice is to pay money for 4 different streaming services and having to hunt around through each one to find what I want to watch, versus clicking one extra link and closing a pop-up ad for an unlimited catalog, the choice doesn't seem that hard.
>The only reason to torrent a show or movie over streaming an illegitimate copy is if you plan on watching it a dozen times over and you have limited bandwidth.
Or you don't want to have to weed through half a dozen ad-filled sites that claim to have the film, but don't, and end up with a 200 MB rip for your trouble.
With some services they cycle through the different copies and stream them.
Netflix is easier and quicker. Next comes kodi with an addon. Trying to watch a full series on demand from your cable company. The experience is so much slower to navigate between shows.. this is before we talk about ads.
maybe just get P4S (Plex for share) and you can get all of that for couple bucks a month. Literally cheaper and no hassle compared to running your own setup.
I have a couple issues with this theory, based on general trends in technology and US infrastructure (barring Elon’s satellite internet).
Storage costs continue to decrease, while 1080p is good enough for most people.
A 4 TB drive is less than $100. 16TB drives are available.
Combined with h.265, that can hold a decent amount of movies and tv shows.
These costs continue to decrease, while capacity continues to increase.
On the other hand, we see little investment in US broadband deployments or upgrades, and these capacities continue to increase in price, without any benefit.
Additionally, the majority of the US that does have broadband, has nothing close to symmetric upload ability.
Maybe I agree with you!
I think affordable internet could be the straw that breaks the camels back.
If you are being charged for every byte transferred, it makes no sense to transfer the same data over and over again, because you enjoy watching it.
Store it once locally, and consume at will.
The whole idea of streaming is kinda dumb when you think about it, it is basically a poorly implemented remote file storage. It is really a product manifestation of IP laws, not technological possibilities.
Probably wasteful from an energy perspective, too.
Cable costs ~$60 per month. If the majority of people switch from cable to streaming, we can expect it to reach a similar price (because people have demonstrated that they are willing to pay that much and because existing hierarchies are set up to consume that much money). If a person isn't paying full price, it will be because they cannot access to every show. In either case, it will be more desirable than you are presenting for then to seek pirated content.
Systems already exist to easily mirror between computers and tvs. I once installed an app called "popcorn time". This had a small button in the corner that I clicked on to find out what it did. All of a sudden, the movie was playing on my television through my blu-ray player. If I can do this on accident, a healthy portion of the less tech-inclined can do it on purpose.
That was once upon a time, when television was the only source of in-home entertainment. If you wanted more you needed to go to your local Blockbuster. Plus in 95% of America you have no choice between different cable providers. Now you have quite a lot of variety - I know literally no one my age who pays for cable. One or two subscriptions seems to be typical and will run you $20-$25 a month. Others share logins to these services with their friends. I don't see people paying $60 a month for entertainment any time soon, but I'm prepared to be proven wrong.
> Cable costs ~$60 per month. If the majority of people switch from cable to streaming, we can expect it to reach a similar price (because people have demonstrated that they are willing to pay that much and because existing hierarchies are set up to consume that much money).
People also need to have internet and a lot of people have the two bundled. If people switch to all streaming services, the cable cartel will raise internet prices and finagle with their caps to gouge even more.
> I don't think piracy will come back as streaming becomes more segregated ... How many non-tech people do you know who can mirror a PC or laptop to their TV?
If they already have the streaming apps on their TV, installing the Kodi-app as well isn’t really very hard.
Especially with geo-ip restrictions still abundant, many places in the world plain old piracy is by far the easiest option.
Also: Why would you assume anyone use their PCs to hook up to the TV these days anyway? It’s not the 1990s anymore.
> How many non-tech people do you know who can mirror a PC or laptop to their TV?
Very few, but they can get a portable drive via sneaker net, plug it into their TV (basically any TV made in the last decade) and have enough content to keep them going for months. Some of the slightly more advanced ones might be able to use a PC to copy shows from one drive to another for friends. Torrent streamers are a minority of pirates.
The problem is that now they want us to have a cable subscription to watch all our normal shows and a network specific subscription to watch our favorite shows. Look at what they’ve done with Star Trek as an example.
They’re going hard on the content gating and distribution channel diffusion. Literally to the point where Plex+Radarr/Sonarr has become the go to for content I’m already paying for through my cable/Netflix/Prime/HBO subscription.
Plex works on all my devices no matter where I am. Netflix doesn’t even do that anymore. Not to mention their latest B.S. of making un-skippable commercials so prevalent on these pay services.
I’d be fine paying for every channel I watch individually if they’d stop creating their own little fiefdoms of varying viewing experiences each of which is designed to turn the profit screws a little further. Plex puts it all in one place on all my devices and doesn’t fuck me with a commercial every time I rewind 30 seconds to see something I just missed.
> The problem is that now they want us to have a cable subscription to watch all our normal shows and a network specific subscription to watch our favorite shows. Look at what they’ve done with Star Trek as an example.
> They’re going hard on the content gating and distribution channel diffusion. Literally to the point where Plex+Radarr/Sonarr has become the go to for content I’m already paying for through my cable/Netflix/Prime/HBO subscription.
I'm a longtime Plex+couch potato/sonarr user and wonder what you get from radarr?
Yeah but psychologically you have to pay ten more bills every month. Not everyone is on full auto pay. Even then, it’s annoying to have ten separate billing dates and such.
Also not to mention having to click ten different apps and manage which app has which show - it can quickly get annoying
Of all the streaming services, Netflix is the one I’m most likely to cancel soon. The quality of Netflix original content is dismal. They have jumped the shark. Used to invest in serious drama, now it’s all lowest common denominator crap hidden behind a huge marketing budget to capture zeitgeisty hype.
I just watched the first episode of When They See Us today: total crap. Ridiculous over-acting, awful writing that feels at every minute like a bad attempt to modify a true story into a cinematic exaggeration (despite the content of the true story it’s based on, which needs zero punch up), choppy editing that needlessly obfuscates character development and makes various scenes feel almost comically unnatural (especially the police interrogation scenes).
It was similar with Seven Seconds. I’m tired of feeling suckered into Netflix dramas that fall apart like a wet napkin.
> used to invest in serious drama, now it’s all lowest common denominator crap
Given that it's Netflix we're talking about here, I find this extremely depressing as it likely means the studios were right; people don't want nuanced thoughtful drama, they want mediocre predictable sitcoms and cop dramas.
HBO seems to still be producing very good dramas. Prime has had one or two offbeat gems recently. I think there’s still a strong market for it, but Netflix is clearly pursuing something else.
Netflix is pursuing everything, not just the “prestige tv” niche. The strategy makes sense as it’s trying to be the replacement for cable tv and the movie industry all in one.
What's good on HBO? I used a VPN to subscribe to HBO and Hulu and ended up canceling it because I ended up watching more Netflix than those services...
Off the top of my head: Succession, VEEP, Barry, Big Little Lies, Sharp Objects, True Detective (seasons 1 & 3), Chernobyl.
Big Little Lies was probably the worst of that bunch, and is still lightyears ahead of any recent Netflix drama.
On Prime, The Man in the High Castle is a guilty pleasure despite its flaws. The bizarre spy drama Patriot is absolutely excellent.
I like that with Prime, I can subscribe to HBO within the app, and also buy seasons of some cable shows, like FX’s Legion, Fargo, What We Do in the Shadows.
I prefer that experience much more than Netflix. With Netflix, the original content has to be so good that it offsets the lack of being able to purchase non-Netflix content, and frankly Netflix originals have just not been good enough to cut it for a while.
I used to feel like $10/month was a ridiculously good deal for Netflix. Now I feel like it’s barely worth it. I’d probably just cancel it if it wasn’t the only service that’s easily accessible outside the US.
> But their shows were a boon for Netflix's nascent streaming service, which had a small library of old movies when it debuted in 2007.
That’s exactly what Netflix is right now. There’s a dearth of new content besides Netflix’s own originals. Netflix routinely suggests titles from 10-15-20 years ago and rarely any newer titles (outside some of the bigger blockbusters like Star Wars).
I don't know what Netflix is like in America but all my content is nothing but new stuff... The only thing that's "old" that shows on my "popular on Netflix" (or what ever its called) section is Friends.
People are probably going to switch from Netflix over to Disney+ once it is launched. Once Netflix is gone, Disney+ would then jack up its price to $40/month. I think we have all seen this movie too many times before.